Jack White

Making a gut decision has never been hard for Jack White. “If somebody
asked me, ‘We’re going to record a guitar part in a hotel room: What
do you want in the room?’ I’d say, ‘I want a 15-watt amp with a reverb,
that Supro guitar, a ribbon microphone, and a reel-to-reel,’” he reveals.
“Somebody else would say, ‘Why don’t you bring down ten of my Les
Pauls, three Stratocasters, a Tele, four of the Silvertones, the Marshall, a
Twin Reverb, six other amps, and we’ll record 45 guitar tracks. And then
I’m going to go on vacation and you engineers pick the best one.’”

While many famous guitar players like to surround themselves with
nearly endless options, that’s not a process that appeals to White. He’s
most comfortable making resolute selections made in the blink of an
eye. “I make my decisions early on and eliminate right from the get-go
so I don’t have to make those choices down the road, because that just
makes it harder on you,” he says.

The youngest of ten siblings, White took on a love for rock, blues,
and country and started out as a drummer in local bands in Detroit.
The singer and multi-instrumentalist has since paid his dues leading
the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather, and he’s collaborated
and/or produced artists ranging from Alicia Keys and Loretta
Lynn to Conan O’Brien, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and even Insane
Clown Posse. His latest project is his first solo effort, Blunderbuss,
which debuted in April and was his first album to hit Number One on
the Billboard 200 chart.

He also heads up a record label and store,
Third Man Records, as well as his own studio,
Third Man Studio, in Nashville. He loves vinyl,
and he likes to produce expensively made novelties
such as liquid-filled and triple-decker
records. “I want to make those things exist,” he
says. “I want to put vinyl in kids’ hands.”

White is also an analog-tape loyalist, nostalgic
for the days before the advent of DAWs.
“You just didn’t have any choices to labor upon
back then,” he laments. “When people say, ‘I
like this guy’s record, but it’s overproduced,’
as a producer I think, ‘What does that mean,
overproduced?’ I wouldn’t want someone
to say that about my music, and I don’t even
know what that word means. All I can think of
as a synonym of that word is ‘opportunity.’ And
that can be a bad thing for some people.”

The former chief engineer for Blackbird
Studio in Nashville, Vance Powell—who engineered
and mixed Blunderbuss at Third
Man—is a bit more outspoken on the subject
of “opportunity.”

“To me, the biggest thing destroying modern
music is that no one will make a f**king decision,”
Powell says with a laugh. “‘I’ve gotta
have all these tracks and all these playlists
of different takes ’cause we might want to
change it later.’ No! Don’t do that. Just say,
‘Yes! I boldly go forward with this.’ And
that’s the great thing with Jack is that he
makes bold decisions.”

To Powell, the lack of commitment in recording
these days stems from fear. “That’s what
putting off those decisions is,” he says. “I have
this motto, and that is, ‘Just because you can do
it doesn’t mean you should.’ Just because you
can align and tweak and tune and make a performance
perfect, that doesn’t mean you should do
it. Humans are humans. The world I live in and
definitely the world Jack lives in, sometimes the
warts are the diamonds, so to speak.”

Powell also believes the old tools to be tried
and true: “Egyptians built pyramids, and they
didn’t have any laser saws or huge trucks or
anything. And those things are pretty cool.
[Laughs.] Let’s put it this way: We sure haven’t
built anything cooler that will still be standing
in 5,000 years.”

Recording in an analog studio, it helps that
White is a confident guitar player and musician
and doesn’t mind losing good takes. “Many times
I have actually recorded over something we
liked,” Powell says. “We’re working on a tape machine that works ludicrously slow, and it’s
just really hard to punch in and out on. Sometimes
you get it, sometimes you don’t. There
have been times when we didn’t and I’m like,
‘Well, we really liked that part, but now it’s
gone. I’m sorry.’ And he’ll just go, ‘It’s okay.
We’ll just do it again better.’”

While White goes with his gut, he’s also apt
to change his mind about things like arrangements.
And when that happens in an analog
studio, it’s nothing like a quick Pro Tools Shuffle.
It takes hours. And when he doesn’t change his
mind, he’ll occasionally regret it later. “There’s
a consequence to making quick decisions,” he
says. “But it’s like any mentor or parent will tell you: Just go with your gut. You’re going to
be wrong sometimes, but in the end you’ll at
least know that you went with what you felt
was the right thing to do at the time.”

Bob Ludwig

In the Live RoomBlunderbuss was largely
tracked live at White’s Third Man Studio,
with few overdubs. The studio includes two
2-inch 8-track Studer A800 tape machines and
a stereo-modified Neve desk originally from
a broadcast studio in Johannesburg, South
Africa. The Studers run at the superslow rate of
7-1/2 ips. “You get an hour and six minutes on a
reel of tape, and it has a dense, effected sound,”
Powell asserts. “What goes in isn’t exactly what comes back, but what goes in is enjoyable. It
allows you to be able to make a great-sounding
rock record that can be played really loud if
you want because there’s none of that digital
harshness. We listened to 15 ips, and we were
like, ‘Wow, that sounds great.’ Then we listened
to 7-1/2, and we were like, ‘Wow, that sounds
really . . . interesting.’”

Although only four of the 13 songs on
Blunderbuss went to more than eight tracks
(maxing out at 14), the track limitations still
left plenty of decisions to be made. “You have
to make hundreds and hundreds of taste
choices all day long while you’re working,”
White says. “If you’re recording one song, and
you have a few musicians with you and a four-track,
you have to decide the tone of the bass,
the tightness of the snare drum, how long the
decay on the ride cymbal is, what compression
you’re using on your vocal microphone,
and if you’re using real reverb compared
to digital reverb. You have to make those
choices over and over and over again.”

At Third Man Records, there’s a vault with tapes of outtakes. There’s not an abundance
of extra material, though. “If you take a White
Stripes album like Elephant: There’s only one
take of every song,” White says. “That’s it. If it
didn’t sound good, we just erased it.”

In the past few years, White streamlined
his decision-making process even more by
producing 45s for other artists. “I started
this thing called the Blue Series where an
artist—say, Tom Jones—would come into the
studio in Nashville, and I would ask, ‘What
do you want to work on?’ And he would say,
‘I would like to do “Jezebel,”’ this Frankie
Laine song. I’d be like, ‘Okay, what if I got
a harp player in here, pedal steel, a drummer,
maybe I’ll play acoustic guitar?’ And
I’ll start making some calls and see who’s
in town and available.

“An hour or so later that day, a handful of
musicians walked in the door to work on
‘Jezebel.’ None of those musicians knew
they were going to be work on ‘Jezebel’ or
Tom Jones’ record that morning. If I told
them two weeks ago this is what they were doing, all these cats would have gone and
learned ‘Jezebel’ off of YouTube, would have
come with a preconception of what it would
have been, and they wouldn’t have brought the
urgency or excitement to that scenario.”

That sense of urgency played out repeatedly
through the course of recording Blunderbuss.
The album’s first single—a quiet, drum-less
ballad called “Love Interruption”—was recorded
live, in a 20x24-foot room, in one take. The
full band recorded it once, but they ended up
using the pared-down version with White on
vocals and acoustic guitar, singer Ruby Amanfu
singing backups, and Brooke Waggoner playing
Wurlitzer. Clarinet/bass clarinet player Emily
Bowland overdubbed her parts later.

For “I’m Shakin’,” a cover of the 1960 hit
song written by Rudolph Toombs for Detroit-based
R&B singer Little Willie John, White and
a few other musicians rehearsed it, and the second
run-through ended up on the record. “We
had a talkback mic out in the room so that while
they were rehearsing, Jack could shout out
chord changes or talk to people in the room,” Powell explains. That setup—an Ampex mic
going through a Union Tube & Transistor More
line-driver pedal and plugged into an Ampex
672 tube-amp speaker with an SM57 miking the
amp—was used for White’s vocals. “That amp
is buzzing like crazy, but you know what? It
doesn’t really matter,” Powell says with a shrug.
“That happened. It was real, and I would never
in a million years think of jumping through
some hoop to get the buzz out.”

White also sings through a Neumann U47
or RCA 77, the signals for which go into the
Neve console into a Universal Audio 1176 compressor
or Neve 2254 compressor in the desk.
“Often I’ll put the 77 and the 47 up real close to
each other,” Powell says. “And if Jack decides
he wants to use the 47, we’ll just swing the
77 out of the way at 90 degrees, and then I’ll
use that as a room mic to get the sound of his
room into the vocal. So there will be two vocal
mics, the mic plugged into the amp, maybe an
amp-mic DI, and a mic on the actual amp, and
they’re all combined to one track to make the
collective entire sound. That’s called commitment.
[Laughs.]”

Bob Ludwig’s tape mastering rig.

Let It Bleed For White’s solo work and the
last Dead Weather record (Sea of Cowards),
Powell sometimes used two tracks for the
drums, giving the kick drum its own track to
“really punch it to tape,” he says. But oftentimes,
as with the Lone Ranger soundtrack
they’ve been working on, the drums get
bounced to one track to leave space for the
unknown, such as strings. While Powell uses
gobos in front of the drums and bass amp,
there’s still a lot of sound melding together.
“The bleed is what makes the record sound
right,” Powell says. “That’s what glues the
whole thing together.”

White’s drum kit is a ’60s-era, four-piece
Ludwig kit with a 22-inch kick (no hole).
Powell miked the kick drum with a Klemt
Echolette ED12 mic (a modified AKG D12).
He also placed a Shure SM57 on the top of
the snare, SM57 on the bottom, an occasional
AEA R92 ribbon mic for the rack and floor
toms, and an AEA R88 overhead mic. For
compression, Powell used an 1176 for the top
snare, an 1176 or Fairchild on the kick, and a
Neve 32609 or RCA BA-6A as the final compressor
to tape. Bouncing everything to one
track, Powell was careful not to make the
snare too loud: “You only have so much flux on the tape, and since it’s running at 7-1/2,
you’ve got to be careful that you don’t crush
the transients,” he says.

One challenge Powell had while managing
bleed was with the parlor-sounding
double pianos on “Hypocritical Kiss.” White,
drummer Carla Azar, Waggoner, and guitarist
Olivia Jean tracked it with White playing
electric bass, as upright bass player Bryn
Davies was on her way from another session.
Waggoner initially played piano on an
upright Steinway (miked from behind on
the soundboard with a single mono U47 fet).
“When we played back the take, I noticed
that there were a lot of drums in the piano
track,” says Powell. “Carla played pretty
loud, and Jack has this huge 26-inch ride cymbal that is the loudest ride cymbal on the
planet. It’s coming through everything. I was
like, ‘We should really clean this up,’ and he
said, ‘Well, we’ll just have Brooke play it.’”

As this was a live take, Waggoner had to
contend with an inexact time frame while recording
her overdub. “She was having a hard
time nailing it exactly, but she ended up playing
this cascading part where she’s playing
an eighth note or a quarter note behind her
original track,” Powell explains. “Then when
we were mixing, I fooled around with having
the pianos panned left and right and having
the drums in the middle. But when it got to
the solo at the end, the piano washed out the
drums. So I panned the drums to the right,
and the tracking piano with the room and the
drums to the left, and then I put Brooke’s piano
on the right with the drums. When you listen
to it, it sounds like one huge piano, but it’s really
a double track.”

Because there were so many commitments
made early on, mixing Blunderbuss was not a
long, arduous process: mainly panning, levels,
and a little bit of parallel bus compression
via an Acme Opticon. “There’s not a single
song on this record that took more than four
or five hours to mix tops, and that’s with us
going to lunch in the middle of it,” Powell
says with a laugh.

Blistering Guitar One of the most powerful
guitar parts on the album is the riff on “Sixteen
Saltines,” which White happened upon by accident.
“That’s really funny because I was testing
a ’60s Fender reverb tank to see how long the
reverb was lasting for whatever we were going to
record that day,” he says. “It has a Dwell knob, and
I was trying to see where to put it. So I played that
riff on my Telecaster because I wanted that riff
to stop, and I was like, ‘Man, record this riff real
quick. I’m starting to like it.’” [Laughs.]

Vance Powell

Powell miked up a ’63 Fender Vibroverb
with a Neumann U 67, White played it twice,
and Powell panned the tracking guitar to the
right and overdub double—played through the
More pedal for a clean gain—to the left. “The
amp was on the floor, and I put the 67 right
on the speaker, right on the outside edge of
the cone,” Powell elaborates. “That’s a single
15-inch driver. That U 67 went to Jack’s Neve
1073, and I go in the line input, not the mic pre,
because the 67 has enough level that you don’t
need the mic pre. If I pad the mic, it always sounds bad, so I’ll use it without the pad and
just go in the line input.”

Guitar solos tend to be blisteringly loud on
Jack White’s albums. “I will push back on that
sometimes with him and be like, ‘Do you think
it’s too loud?’” Powell says. “But he’s like, ‘It
can never be too loud.’” One happy accident
really pushed a solo to the extreme: Powell
intended to send the guitar signal through the
line input for “Take Me with You When You
Go”—but didn’t. “That’s a patching mistake,”
he admits. “We’d been using this ribbon mic
for some fiddle and mandolin, and I wanted
to use it on his guitar solo. We’d used a couple
of Helios modules as EQ on another tracks,
so they were set up to go into the line input,
which was perfectly great because I knew the
level coming out of this mic would be loud.
He was playing that riff, and I patched into
the Helios and slowly turned the fader up, and
when I did, I realized that it was patched into
the mic input. Out on the floor, we have a remote
mic pre for the ribbon, so the ribbon was
sending a huge, line signal into the mic pre, and it was blowing up the Helios module in a
most unbelievably fantastic way.”

Compressionless Mastering One stipulation
White had for mastering engineer
Bob Ludwig was that he wouldn’t use any
dynamics processing in the mastering process.
“There was a study from Earl Vickers
[sfxmachine.com/docs/loudnesswar] about
the ‘loudness wars,’” Powell says. “As the
loudness war escalated, record sales went
down. I’m not saying we’re killing the volume war. But I think it’s a very bold move for
Jack to say, ‘I realize that there are records
out there that are going to be louder, but I
don’t care.’”

Mastering without compression is something
that White wanted to do for a while. For
years when he asked engineers about it, he
didn’t get a definitive answer. “I read this book,
Perfecting Sound Forever [by Greg Milner],
and it was very interesting, talking about
the loudness wars and the speed wars back
then—33 versus 45 [rpm]—and how history
has gone through all this bizarreness of trying
to get the best-quality sound. So this
album came up, and I was like, ‘Can we just
not change the dynamics of the song? Just
make it louder, but don’t compress or limit
it?’ Bob Ludwig was like, ‘Of course we can
do that.’ And I was like, ‘Why the hell didn’t
anyone tell me that you can do that?! I’ve
been asking this question for years!’” So the
master came back, and it sounded great.
There’s nothing squashed or lost in the dynamics,
and it still sounded really loud.”

While leaving dynamic processing alone,
Ludwig did have to do a double session for Blunderbuss.
“Jack wanted to have a vinyl record that
had no digital processing whatsoever on it,” he
says. “So he wanted to record from the one-inch
to another one-inch. I haven’t done that in,
wow, a pretty long time. And of course to make
CDs and downloads, I also recorded at high-resolution
digital, at 96/24. Mastering in this
case was basically just signal path integrity,
level rides, and equalization.”

Ludwig’s studio has two modified Ampex
one-inch, 2-track tape machines. “Tim de
Paravicini of Esoteric Audio Research [EAR]
used to make these beautiful tube electronics
that we used on one of the cuts,” he explains.

“Our machine has different sets of playback
electronics: his tube and then Mike Spitz’s
Aria Electronics with the solid-state, Class-A
electronics. And then the recording machine was an Aria Class-A machine, as well.”

For the analog session, Ludwig used Manley
Massive Passive, George Massenburg, and
SPL EQs. “If it was something that was a clinical
thing that needed a cleaning up, I used the
Massenburg or SPL,” Ludwig says. “And when
it was an overall, fat kind of sound, it was the
Massive Passive.”

For the digital pass, Ludwig used a Pacific
Microsonics digital converter and a Merging
Technologies Pyramix digital workstation.
In order to match the one-inch sound as
closely as possible, Ludwig did careful alignment.
“When I did the EQ master for the one-inch, I
went through five alignment tones—the 1k, 10k,
15k, 100Hz, and 50Hz—to make sure that the
playback of it was as accurate as I sent to it.”

Ludwig spent some time doing subtle gain
rides to push choruses and splicing together
edits of different mixes. As the album had to be
mastered twice, it also had to be edited twice, so
much of his work went to splicing into the one-inch
master and then editing again in the digital
domain. On “Freedom at 21,” Ludwig spliced in one of the background vocals from the vocal-down
mix for just one second. Another microscopic
fix on a song was a popped “P” on the
word “Put.” “I had to do a separate pass using the
Manley Massive Passive with a 122Hz hi-pass filter
to get rid of the pop and edit in the 100 millisecond
fix into both the one-inch and the digital,”
he says. And “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” required
multiple versions. “Jack went through
it with a fine-tooth comb until every mix and every note was just right,” Ludwig reveals.

In the end, White was pleased that he was
able to avoid compression overload for Blunderbuss.
“Nowadays when you’re recording,”
he says, “you put a compression pedal on your
guitar going to your amp. The microphone
from your amp to the tape has compression on
it. Then you compress in a submix to another
track. Then you compressed it again with the
bus compressor to the final stereo mix. Then
the stereo mix goes to mastering and gets compressed
yet again. Then the album comes out
and gets played to radio and gets compressed
yet again. Sometimes you’re talking about seven
or eight compressions of that original signal
before someone actually hears it on the radio.”

And let’s not forget MP3 compression: “Oh
God, yeah, totally!”

CHALLENGING STEREOTYPES

On tour for Blunderbuss, White brings two bands: one with all-female musicians and one with all-male musicians. “I said, ‘What if
I had two bands, and neither of them knows if they’re going to play that night?’” he explains. “The idea behind the experiment is
that it’s really shaking things up. It’s been a really funny, strange learning experience for everybody in the camp. The novelty of
it competing with the reality makes you think. You have people vocalizing stereotypes, like, ‘I saw both bands, and I thought the
girls were gentler and warmer.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you crazy? The girls are kicking ass. They’re playing twice as loud as the guys
last night.’ It’s funny. Sometimes people’s preconceptions overpower what they’re seeing and hearing with their eyes and ears.”

Kylee Swenson Gordon is a writer, editor,
and musician based in Oakland, CA. Her first
book, Electronic Musician Presents the Recording
Secrets Behind 50 Great Albums,
comes out this month.